The Moment She Was Gone

3

We call Bellevue. Or rather, I do. They have no record of a patient named Anne Rozalia Gulliver having been admitted that night. Rozalia is my sister’s middle name. It was my grandmother Lederer’s name, too, as you know. My sister despises it. My middle name is Robert, which is no winner, either, but it was my grandfather Gulliver’s name. Anne Rozalia Gulliver and Andrew Robert Gulliver. Twins, of course, though not identical, and named like twins, though not identically.

We were so much alike when we were young.

In high school, I once played Mortimer Brewster in a production of Arsenic and Old Lace. No, I’m not an actor, although my mother tried to encourage such a pursuit. I am merely a school teacher. Anyway, there’s a line in the play, where Mortimer is trying to explain his family to his girlfriend Elaine. When I delivered the line, I thought it was funny. The audience thought so, too. The scene — I still remember it — goes like this:

It practically gallops.

The audience fell down laughing.

It practically gallops.

My brother Aaron doesn’t like to think insanity practically gallops in our family. His two adopted daughters are immune, of course, but suppose he himself should one day begin brushing imaginary cockroaches off the coverlet, an unlikelihood at his age, but, listen, who can tell?

I put the phone receiver back on its cradle.

“She’s not at Bellevue,” I say.

“I think we should call the police,” Augusta suggests.

“No police,” my mother says flatly. “I don’t want Annie ending up in another lunatic asylum. She isn’t psychotic.”

“The doctor in Sicily told Andy...”

“Some doctor.”

“If a goddamn psychiatrist flatly states...”

“I’m not interested in what he stated. And watch your language, Miss.”

“In fact, we should have called the police years ago.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Calm down, you two, okay?” Aaron says.

“When you live with a person closely,” my mother says, quite evenly, “you get to know that person pretty well, even if she is your own daughter. Annie functions fine on her own...”

“Still,” Augusta says, “we can’t dismiss the fact...”

“Normally,” my mother says, raising her voice, “she functions well on her own. She is capable of making and executing plans...”

“Which sometimes get her in trouble,” Aaron says.

“Not very often,” my mother says.

“Often enough,” Augusta says. “She just landed herself in a Sicilian hospital...”

“That is a rare instance.”

“... where she was diagnosed as schizophrenic.”

“Nonsense,” my mother says. “If I had to characterize her, I’d say she’s an artistically obsessed religious zealot.”

“Then maybe she’s hiding out in St. Patrick’s Cathedral,” Augusta says. “Or the Museum of Modern Art.”

I hate it when my sister-in-law tries to be funny about Annie. I think she does this only to gain further favor with Aaron, who by the way has never thought any of our sister’s little escapades were in the slightest bit comical, even when they really were. As for example, the time she peed on a cop’s shoes in Georgia.

“Or maybe we ought to go look for her guru,” Augusta adds, compounding the felony.

“Augusta, you’re not being funny,” I say.

“Tell her,” my mother says.

“We’re trying to figure out what to do here, and you...”

“All right, all right,” Augusta says, and waves her hands on the air.

“If Annie really tries to hurt someone...”

“She won’t hurt anyone,” my mother says.

“You don’t know that, Mom.”

“I know she hasn’t hurt anyone so far.”

I give my mother a look, but say nothing.

We spend the next hour or so calling every hospital in New York City. My mother has only one line going into her apartment, so we take turns on the phone. There are thirty or so general hospitals in Manhattan, and another fifty or more in the other four boroughs. We call the ones in Manhattan first, because we figure if Annie’s going to get in trouble it’ll be right here in the city and not anywhere else.

Augusta, by the way, still doesn’t know that to anyone born and bred in New York, Manhattan is “the city.” If somebody living in the Bronx is going downtown to see a Broadway show, he says he’s going “into the city,” even though technically, the Bronx is part of the city as well. Augusta was born in Ridley Hills, New Jersey, where she was the belle of the ball and the delight of the Ridley Royals. She doesn’t know from city streets. I know she hates my sister, and won’t allow her to set foot in her house. Maybe that’s why I dislike her so intensely.

She now keeps insisting that we call the police. Mama will hear of no such thing. After what happened in Sicily, she is afraid Annie will end up in some mental institution again, in a strait jacket, banging her head against the wall and sitting in her own shit. They will perform electro-convulsive therapy on her, and immerse her in hot or cold baths, and eventually they will do a prefrontal lobotomy and turn her into a fucking vegetable..

Sometimes, I, too, believe this will happen to my poor dear sister.

And it frightens me.

It is Augusta’s turn on the phone now. When she has called ten hospitals in Manhattan, one of us will relieve her, and begin calling the next ten. Meanwhile, we are trying to dope out where Annie might have gone.

“I just hope she isn’t already on a plane to Timbuktu,” my mother says.

“Did you give her money again?” I ask.

“No. But there’s nothing wrong with giving her money.”

“After Sicily, I would have hoped...”

“Forget Sicily. You’re obsessed with Sicily. What happened there is not representative.”

“Maybe we should call the airports, anyway,” Aaron suggests. “In case she got hold of some money somehow.”

“Oh, she knows how to get hold of money, all right,” Augusta says, and rolls her eyes.

“Well, let’s finish with the hospitals first,” I say.

“You really should put in a second line,” Aaron tells my mother.

“Sure, and who’ll pay for it?”

“It would come in handy in emergencies like this.”

“This isn’t an emergency,” my mother says. “Annie’s gone away before. She’s always managed to take care of herself and come back safely.”

“This is a waste of time,” Augusta says, and puts the phone back on its cradle. “It’s four in the morning, all I’m getting are nurses’ aides with Spanish accents.”

“Nobody speaks English in this city anymore,” my mother says.

“Must be a conspiracy, Mom.”

“Tell me about it, Andrew.”

“Augusta’s right,” Aaron says, ever to the rescue. “Annie isn’t in any hospital, she’s just hiding. As usual.”

“You know that for a fact, huh, Aaron?” I say.

“I’m basing it on empirical knowledge. She has never tried to hurt herself, so why are we calling every damn hospital in the city? We called Bellevue, that should be enough.”

“By the time we call all these hospitals,” Augusta says, “she could be on her way to God knows where.”

I’m beginning to think they’re right. If Annie, God forbid, got hit by a bus, and they took her to the nearest hospital, they’d immediately discover she was nuts — if, in fact, she is — and transfer her to Bellevue, wouldn’t they? But we ourselves have been living with her strange behavior ever since she was sixteen, and none of us ever thought she was truly sick until Bertuzzi in Sicily laid all the cards on the table, and called a spade a spade. It’s possible, then, that she’s already in some hospital out there, suffering from a broken leg or a nose bleed, and no one has yet recognized that she may need... well... psychiatric help.

“Maybe we ought to call Dr. Lang,” I suggest.

“A lot of good she did,” my mother says. “Annie’s run off again, hasn’t she? Don’t you have a cell phone, Aaron? President of a big corporation? Your brother, I can understand...”

Meaning I am but a mere teacher of English in the New York City school system.

“But you? Even Annie has a cell phone. You really should get a cell phone.”

“Maybe we should call that shrink,” Augusta says.

“Why?” my mother asks.

“Well, first of all,” I say, “I’d like to hear her evaluation of...”

“I wouldn’t.”

“She may have some insights into...”

“You shouldn’t have gone to her in the first place.”

“It was Annie’s suggestion, Mom.”

“You chose the doctor.”

“Annie asked me to find one.”

“With a little noodge from her brother, hmm?”

“Mom, she told me she wanted to...”

“Sure, and you listened to her. A person who’d just been through a traumatic experience in Italy...”

“Where she was diagnosed as schizophrenic, by the way,” Augusta says.

“Thank you for reminding us of that again, darling.”

“I merely speak the truth,” Augusta says, and shrugs.

“Hey, everybody, knock if off, okay?” Aaron says.

“I don’t see any harm in calling Dr. Lang.”

“She’ll just want to lock your sister up again.”

“I didn’t get the impression...”

“Psychiatrists.”

“... that she wanted to lock Annie up, Mom.”

“It was a psychiatrist who locked her up in Sicily, wasn’t it?”

“I’m going downstairs for a cigarette,” Augusta says.

“Sure, smoke yourself to death,” my mother says.

“I’ll see you later,” Augusta says, and takes her handbag, and heads for the front door.

“I’ll come with you,” Aaron says, “this neighborhood.”

“There’s nothing wrong with this neighborhood!” my mother says.

“I meant, this hour of the night.”

“Any hour of the night!” my mother snaps, and cuts him a sharp look, but he doesn’t notice, he’s already out the door. Besides, we both know his going downstairs has nothing to do with the neighborhood. He is going down to have a smoke with Augusta. Five years ago, he told us he quit smoking. We both know this is a lie because even his clothes smell of tobacco. But he keeps up the pretense because he thinks it improves his stature in our eyes. He knows I can’t stand Augusta. And he knows that however much he may achieve professionally, he will never quite earn Mama’s approval. In that respect, Aaron and I are in the very same boat. Mama doesn’t think much of my professional status, either. Then again, I haven’t ever really achieved anything.

Once upon a time, I wanted to be a writer.

Before my father left, he used to read to me and Annie and Aaron at bedtime. One of our favorite books was The Once and Future King. Annie loved all the parts where Merlin changes the Wart into a fish and all kinds of flying birds and finally a badger. I liked the Wart’s adventures with Robin Wood, which of course was the legendary Robin Hood’s true and honorable name. Listening to my father read to us, I thought if I could ever write like T. H. White, I would be the happiest person in the entire world. Then my father left home, and from what I could gather he had gone to live with his mother for a while, so I wrote him a letter and asked my mother to mail it to him.

The letter read:

He never came home.

I sometimes wonder if my mother ever mailed that letter.

The crying was one thing.

When I stopped eating, that was another story.

I was never a picky eater until my father left home. Then everything seemed to taste rotten.

One night, I was playing in the living room with this dart set my grandmother sent me for my sixth birthday — we weren’t allowed to see Grandma Kate anymore, but she still sent us gifts, which my mother didn’t dare keep from us.

The dart set had a target with circles on it and a bull’s eye and six darts with different colored feathers on them for different players. I put the target on a piece of plywood so the darts wouldn’t damage anything if I missed. My mother was already annoyed that Grandma Kate had sent me a game with pointed things in it; she’d have taken a fit if I threw a dart and wrecked a wall or a piece of furniture.

When she called us in to dinner, Aaron came from where he was pounding on the piano, and Annie came from where she was playing with one of her dolls, and I came in from practicing darts, carrying one of the darts with me, the one with the red feathers. I was sort of twirling the dart around on my fingers when my mother came in with our dinner. She prided herself on her cooking, my mother did. She cooked about as well as Aaron played piano, but all her friends kept telling her she was a terrific cook.

That night, she was serving these thick veal chops Aaron loved, with mashed potatoes and creamed spinach she made herself that wasn’t frozen. She had just put everything on the table when a fly started buzzing around the kitchen. This was an old apartment, what they called pre-war, and it had no air-conditioning, which meant we kept the windows open winter and summer, though not as much in the winter, and there were flies in it year round.

Through the open doorway connecting kitchen and dining room, I watched the fly as it landed first on the refrigerator and then the cookie jar in the shape of a pig on the counter near the stove, and then zipped out of the kitchen and into the dining room and landed on the wall someplace behind me. I whirled around in my chair and without even taking aim, threw the dart, and hit the fly smack behind its head, pinning it to the wall. A gooey white fluid came oozing out of the fly, and I went “Ick!” and turned back to the table to find sitting in front of me a big bowl of mashed potatoes that looked just like the gooey white stuff coming out of the fly.

My mother didn’t know I’d nailed a fly to the wall with what had to be the luckiest shot in all New York City, even better than a bull’s eye. She’d been busy running in and out of the kitchen carrying platters and plates and now she saw me looking down at the bowl of mashed potatoes she’d worked very hard to make creamy and smooth, and she saw me nulling a face, and heard me saying “Ick!” and she said at once, “What now?” because ever since I’d stopped crying over my father leaving, I’d been a pain in the ass about eating.

“I don’t want any potatoes,” I said, and Aaron said, “He just killed a fly,” and my mother said, “Shut up, Aaron,” and then, to me, “Why not?” and I said, “They’re icky,” and Annie said, “You should’ve seen it, Mom!” and my mother said, “Shut up, Annie,” and to me, “Icky? Icky?” and Aaron said, “Can we start eating, Mom?” and my mother said, “Shut up, Aaron!” and picked up the bowl of potatoes in both hands and dumped it onto my head. Just turned the bowl over on my head like a helmet.

The potatoes were every bit as creamy and as smooth as my mother might have hoped. They streamed over my forehead and into my eyes and down my cheeks and mouth and dripped from my chin. I began crying again, the way I had after my father left. “And I’ve had enough of that goddamn crying!” my mother shouted. “Go to your room!” My sister started crying, too. “And you, too, you little pisspants!” my mother shouted.

I went first to the bathroom where I wiped off my face with toilet paper and then washed it and dried it with a towel, and then went into my room where I discovered there was mashed potato all over my pants, too. I wiped that off with my handkerchief before I got undressed. Then I crawled into bed, and cried myself to sleep. Next door, I could hear Annie crying, too.

Aaron and my mother ate dinner alone that night.

The next morning, I was afraid to talk to her.

When Annie, Aaron, and I were kids, we used to hide under the dining room table, eavesdropping on the conversation of the grownups. Once we heard Grandma Kate use the word “shit,” and we burst out laughing, and Mama sent all of us to our rooms — but she was laughing, too. This was before my father abandoned us. The moment he was gone, my mother changed a lot. It was like night and day. Two different people. Aaron told us she was grieving. Neither Annie nor I knew what grieving meant.

She never took us to see Grandma Kate anymore.

She told us that when Daddy abandoned us, it was the same thing as Grandma Kate abandoning us. It was the whole Gulliver family that had abandoned us. Annie told her she loved Grandma Kate and Aunt Tess and Uncle Mike, and she didn’t know why she couldn’t see them anymore. My mother told her to shut up, we can’t see them anymore, and that’s that!

“What do you mean, we can’t see them?” Annie asked. “Did they disappear? Like Merlin?”

“Just be quiet,” my mother said.

“Regular people can’t disappear, can they?” Annie asked me.

“I don’t think so.”

“Regular people can’t disappear,” Annie told my mother.

“That’s right, they can’t,” Aaron said. “So shut up.”

“Did Daddy disappear?”

“Daddy abandoned us,” my mother said.

“What’s abandon?”

“It means he went away forever,” Aaron said.

“He did not,” Annie said.

“Yes, he did,” my mother said, and I burst into tears.

On Thanksgiving Day that year...

There was some kind of mixup on Thanksgiving Day.

I can remember playing jacks with Annie in her room (she always cheated, making up rules and then changing them five minutes later) and hearing my mother shouting to all us kids to come have breakfast. Aaron was practicing piano in the living room; he was ten years old and wanted to be Arthur Rubinstein, but he had no talent. We all went into the kitchen in our pajamas and robes. My mother cautioned us not to eat too much cereal because this was Thanksgiving Day and there’d be turkey and all the trimmings at Grandma Rozalia’s.

“Which reminds me,” she said, and picked up the phone. We were still living on Columbus Avenue, and there was a phone hanging over the kitchen counter. My mother stood at the counter in her apron, dialing Grandma Rozalia’s number.

I could hear only my mother’s end of the conversation. From what I could gather, Grandma was telling her there’d been some sort of mistake. She’d thought we were going to Grandma Kate’s for Thanksgiving. My mother said, “Mama, how can we be going to Kate’s? Terry abandoned us, we don’t go to Kate’s anymore, are you getting senile?” My mother listened. So did all us kids. “No, Mama,” she said, “we made these plans a long time ago, don’t you remember? Anyway, it’s academic, isn’t it? Academic. Well, I’m sorry you don’t know what that means, Mama, but it’s a word. ‘Academic.’ It means Terry and I are separated, Terry and I are getting a divorce, we can’t go to his mother’s on Thanksgiving Day.” She listened a moment and then said, “Mama, I know we usually come to you on Passover, but things are different now, and besides, Mama, you invited us!” She listened again, and then said, “I don’t know when.” Pause. “September.” Another pause. “October maybe, I know you invited us. Things have been so crazy around here...” She listened again. “So what are you saying? We’re not invited there today? Is that what you’re saying?” And listened again. “Let me get this straight, Mama. There’s no room at the table? Is that what you’re saying? Who?” She listened and said, “They’re not even family. There’s room at your Thanksgiving Day table for strangers, but there’s no room for your daughter and your three grandchildren, is that what you’re saying?” She listened and said, “Then what are you saying, Mama?” And listened. And said, “I see. Uh-huh.” And listened again. “The big table seats ten, uh-huh, and you’ve already got twelve at it, and you’re putting the kids at the smaller round table off the foyer, I see. So it looks like all your other children will be there having turkey with you and some strangers because you haven’t got room for us!” And listened for just an instant, and then said, “No, you listen to me, Mama!” and stopped listening altogether. “If there’s no room for us, then we’re not coming, we wouldn’t dream of inconveniencing you. But let me tell you, Mama, you’re not going to see us in that house ever again. So give all our love, don’t interrupt me, Mama, to all your fortunate children who’ll be there with you today, but don’t hold your breath till you see us again!” and slammed down the phone.

“What’d you do?” Aaron asked.

“What’d I do? What’d your grandmother do, no room at the table!”

“If there’s no room, there’s no room, Mom. What do you want her to do, build a bigger house?”

“Why’d she invite strangers?”

“Because she didn’t know we were coming.”

“I can understand family, but strangers? And then there’s no room at the table? I’ll never go there again, Aaron.”

“Mom, don’t be...”

“And you’re never going there again, either,” she told all of us. “We were invited a month ago! Two months ago! You know what she accomplished today? She kissed this family goodbye, is what she accomplished. Her own daughter, her grandchildren, she kissed us all goodbye.”

“Is everybody disappearing?” Annie asked.

In January, Grandma came over in the middle of the night to tell my mother she had cancer.

They made up after that.

We sit on the sofa in the vast empty living room, sipping coffee, my mother and I. It is now five-thirty in the morning. Morngloam has not yet begun to tint the eastern sky. The night is still black out there, and Annie has been gone for almost four hours. We do not know what to say to each other. It seems to me that my mother and I have not known what to say to each other for the longest time now, perhaps ever since my father went away. She sips her coffee the way Grandma Rozalia used to, pinky extended in the European manner, as if she is holding a demitasse instead of a breakfast cup. Her eyes are hollow. I hate what my sister does to her.

“Do you think there might be something in her letters?” she asks.

“What letters? She didn’t leave a letter, did she?”

“No, I mean the ones she sent me over the years.”

“I doubt it. Why would there be anything in her letters?”

“Places she went, things she did. Maybe she’s going back to one of them. I don’t know.”

She sighs heavily. The sigh is one of utter despair.

“Do you have them?” I ask.

“Shall I get them?” she asks, and without waiting for an answer, she rises and walks softly into the bedroom. I sit alone in the living room. The house seems so empty and still. My mother returns with a tiny rubber-banded packet of envelopes in her hand. She sits beside me, and hands the packet to me. I remove the rubber band, slip it over my wrist. The first letter reads:

There is no return address on the envelope.

It occurs to me that in all of her journeys, my sister never gave us the names of people she was living with or renting from or traveling with. She would not even give us the name of a hotel or a B&B where she was staying only temporarily. If pressed on the telephone, she would say, “I don’t know the name.” If you told her that everybody in the world knows the name of the hotel he’s staying at, she would say, “This is just a small hotel, I don’t know the name.” If you told her to go talk to the manager and ask him the name of the hotel, she’d say, “I’ll do that tomorrow,” and then she wouldn’t call for the next month, by which time she would have changed hotels, and would claim she didn’t know the name of the new one.

There is no return address on the second envelope, either. I take the letter from it, unfold it, and begin reading:

“Did what?”

“Where are you?”

“Here. The broken glass.”

“I have no idea.”

“What’s this about skinheads?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“What do you mean? Some guys threatening her?”

“Her jewelry can be very provocative. Well, you know her jewelry.”

The stamp on the next envelope is most certainly from Indonesia, but again, there is no return address. The letter itself is very short:

“Are there flamingos in Indonesia?”

“If there are flamingos in Miami, there are flamingos in Indonesia. What are you thinking? That she was seeing things?”

The next letter is on lined paper torn from a spiral notebook. It reads:

“When was this?” I ask. “Where was she?”

“Greece, I think. I’m not sure.”

“Which trip?”

“Look at the envelope. There should be a date on the envelope.”

I turn the envelope over in my hands. The stamp and postmark are indeed Greek, but the date is illegible.

“What severe medical condition were you worried about, Mom?”

“A young girl traveling alone, all over the world, who knew what might happen?”

“But Annie smelled mental condition, didn’t she?”

“I don’t know what she smelled or didn’t smell. I was only concerned that she have proper medical care if ever she needed it.”

“Did you ever get that insurance for her?”

“I tried. Her conditions were impossible to meet.”

There was a postcard showing a lagoon and a white sand beach identified as Koh Tao, Thailand. The postmark on the Thai stamp was Ko Phangan. Annie had written:

And lastly, there was a long undated letter that started with the words Happy Birthday, Mom! so it had to’ve been written in April sometime because that’s when my mother’s birthday is:

“Did you read this letter?” I ask.

“Of course, I read it. I read all her letters. There weren’t that many, you know.”

“What’d you think, Mom?”

“I thought she wrote very well. For someone who never went to college.”

“ ‘Shifting to the next form’? What does that mean?”

“She probably meant ‘shifting to the next foot’ She’s walking through a forest, you know. Feeling every root and vine underfoot.”

“Shifting to the next form,” I say again, repeating the words as if this will help me understand them.

“A slip of the pen,” my mother says.

“Mm.”

“Why? What do you think, Professor? She’s Dracula changing into a bat?”

“Cobras dreaming,” I say. “She heard cobras dreaming.”

“That was simile,” she says, and shrugs.

I look at her.

“You know what simile is, don’t you, Professor?”

“Sure. It’s the same thing as metaphor.”

I point my finger at her like a pistol, pull the imaginary trigger.

“Gotcha,” I say.

Mama doesn’t even smile.

I slip the rubber band from my wrist and onto the envelopes again. I am thinking it is such a slender body of correspondence for so many mighty journeys. I hand the bundle back to her. Mama places it on her lap, sighs at it, as if it has let her down somehow.

“Maybe we should call that woman, after all,” she says.

For a moment, I’m not sure who she means.

“Woman?” I say.

“The shrink you saw last week.”

“Oh.”

“Whatever her name was. Was she any good, Andrew?”

“Lang. Yes, she seemed okay.”

“Only okay?”

“She seemed fine, Mom.”

“Did Annie mention what they talked about?”

“I was there, Mom. I know what they talked about.”

“What do you mean, you were there? You mean in the room with them?”

“Yes, Mom. Annie wanted me to come in.”

“And she let you? The shrink?”

“Her name is Lang, Mom, Dr. Lang. She’s a respected psychiatrist at Mount...”

“And she let you hear what a patient was saying?”

“I told you, Annie wanted me to come in.”

“That’s highly unusual, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know if it’s unusual or not.”

“Well, it seems highly unusual to me.”

“So be it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, so be it?”

“It means if you think it was unusual, then you think it was unusual. Apparently, Dr. Lang didn’t think it was so unusual because she permitted it.”

My mother nods.

Her nods mean either “You are a jackass, son,” or “There’s no use even talking to you.” In this instance, her nod probably means both.

“So what’d your sister tell her?”

“She said she was molested when she was a kid.”

“Nonsense.”

“When she was eleven years old.”

“No.”

“She said Mr. Alvarez put his hand under her skirt...”

“Who on earth is Mr... Oh. The super? When we were living on Seventy-second Street? Annie never said any such thing! You’re making this up.”

“Stuck his finger in her, she says. She wet her pants. She peed on his hand.”

“Really, Andrew.”

“Mother, it’s what she told Dr. Lang.”

“Dr. Lang!” she says.

“She also said she heard Mr. Alvarez’s voice coming from the television set.”

“Well,” my mother says. “Everyone hears voices.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m sure Annie didn’t mean actually hearing his voice coming from the television. Or maybe she was just listening to thoughts inside her head. Everyone has internal thoughts, Andrew. You teach English, haven’t you ever heard of interior monologues?”

“Yes, Mother, I...”

“Ulysses, remember, Professor? Finnegans Wake?”

“I’m merely repeating what Annie...”

“Or didn’t you ever study James Joyce?”

Her sarcasm is biting. I am suddenly five years old again. My father is gone. He never answered my letter, I have no father. I keep crying all the time. My mother keeps telling me to stop crying all the time, I can’t seem to stop crying. Aaron rabbit-punches me every time he passes me in the apartment. The apartment seems so huge with my father gone. Whenever I start crying, Annie begins crying, too. We are a gang, my sister and I.

My mother is pacing now.

“What else did Annie tell this Lang woman?” she asks.

This Lang Woman. Some sort of devious mid-Victorian figure with high hair and a corseted waist and a plumed hat, stalking drawing rooms and salons where she smiles secretly and eavesdrops on the confidences of young Tantric initiates. With those three words, my mother washes down the drain four years of college and four years of medical school and four years of psychiatric residency, leaving “This Lang Woman” standing exposed for the charlatan and quack she most certainly is.

“She told her all about Sicily.”

“All about Sicily?”

“Well, almost everything, Mother.”

“Told her what that doctor...”

“Said they all thought she was crazy, yes.”

She whirls on me suddenly. Her eyes are blazing the way they had that night long ago, when she called my sister a little pisspants. I expect another bowl of mashed potatoes on my head. I almost cower from her.

“And you let her say all this?”

“Mom, it was her nickel.”

“Her nickel? My nickel, you mean, don’t you?”

“Annie was there to talk. What good would it have done if...”

“What were you thinking?” she yells. “Did you suddenly lose your...?”

She cuts herself short. I suspect she was about to suggest that perhaps I’d suddenly lost my mind, too, but of course this observation would have been at odds with what she believes, or disbelieves, to be the truth about Annie. She begins pacing again, stalking the room like a lynx, all green-eyed and auburn-haired with a little help from a rinse bottled by my brother’s firm. I cannot tell whether she is furious or merely desperate.

“Mom,” I say, “she’s gone again, okay?”

My mother nods.

“Let’s just try to find her, okay?”

She nods again.

“Mom?”

She keeps nodding. I can’t even imagine what’s going on inside her head. She just keeps pacing silently, nodding.

“Okay, Mom?”

“Yes,” she says at last. “Okay.”

And nods again.